The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
- Автор: Adams Cleve F., Babcock Dwight V.
- Год: 2010
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
- ISBN: 978-0-307-45543-7
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.
January rubbed his wrist and then fingered the lump on his jaw. Darrold thought that January had a proper hangdog look.
Krobey took charge. “Okay, Miss Logan. You stand over there. Where was she, January?”
“Closer to the sink.”
“Like this?” Doris asked.
“That’s fine,” January said, swallowing hard. Darrold leaned against the far wall.
“I was right here,” January said, “and Mrs. Darrold was over by the sink.”
There was the sudden, surprising crash of a shot. Doris Logan sagged over the sink, toppled back onto the floor. Darrold watched her, intensely amazed. He was confused. He turned and stared out the open window.
He stared and stared. Then he looked back at Krobey and Love. They were both moving toward him.
“Hey!” he said weakly. A patrolman in uniform appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Them blanks are loud, hey?” the patrolman said.
“Are you men crazy?” Darrold demanded.
“Like foxes,” Krobey said. “All you got to do is tell us why you looked out that window, Darrold.”
“Well, I... well, nobody had a gun and... well, it seemed the logical...”
“But, Mr. Darrold,” Krobey said sweetly, “you didn’t look around at us to see if we had fired a gun. You looked from the girl to the window. Why?”
Darrold’s lips felt like dry pork fat as he stretched them in a smile. “Don’t be absurd,” he said in a thin voice. “There’s your man!”
But January wasn’t where he pointed. He looked. January was over by the sink. He had helped the redhead to her feet. And hadn’t let go of her.
“Could it be you fired through that window and killed your wife, Darrold?” Krobey asked.
“Do you have to lean over me and breathe in my face?”
Darrold had moved back until he touched the wall and still Krobey’s face was inches from his. “Damn it!” Darrold yelled. “January is your man. They quarreled. Cynthia shot him and...”
Krobey underlined it for him by asking, “Who said anything about January being shot, Darrold?”
Out of the fear that enveloped him, Darrold made one last effort. “Nonsense, Krobey! When she was killed I was on a train a long way from here. You people proved that.”
“Oh, you mean Dan Walker, the bookkeeper? Yeah, his books were checked this morning. You were pretty clever to find the way he was rigging the books. And then, to make him play ball with you, you told him you’d squeal on him unless he swore he put you on the Empire City.”
Darrold looked from one face to the other. Suddenly it felt good to be leaning against the wall. “Unwritten law,” he said. “Deserved to die. Sure, I killed her. I borrowed Walker’s car, drove over here, parked on the high road, came down through the brush to the new house next door. The window was always open. I killed her. When he started toward the window, I had to give him one. I drove back to Barnston and took a later train, made a few of my appointments in Richfield, stayed overnight and drove back here the next morning.”
“Unwritten law? What unwritten law, Darrold?” Krobey asked.
“She drove me crazy,” Darrold said, his mind racing for escape.
“And so you killed her?”
“Yes. I bought the gun nine months ago.”
Love snapped the handcuff onto Darrold’s wrist, yanking heartily.
As Love walked out with Darrold trudging along behind him, Krobey looked at January and the redhead.
Krobey said, “That Walker guy cut his throat and died last night without opening his mouth to confess.”
Krobey watched them for a moment, sighed heavily and walked over to the open window, put his elbows on the sill and looked out.
Three Apes from the East
H. H. Stinson
H(erbert) H. Stinson (1896–1969) lived in California, where he worked as a journalist and police reporter. While working as a newspaperman, he also wrote fiction for the pulps, selling a Western to Top Notch in 1928. He also wrote plays, including Ace Is Trumped, a one-act published in Hollywood Plays (1930). His career as a pulp writer lasted about two decades, with contributions to most of the major magazines of the era, including Argosy, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Black Mask. His best-known series character, Ken O’Hara, appeared in fourteen Black Mask stories, beginning with “Give the Man Rope” in the April 1933 issue. Joseph T. Shaw, when he compiled The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), his important anthology of Black Mask stories, selected this story for inclusion, but his editor at Simon & Schuster thought it weaker than the other stories and dropped it, along with several others. The tales about O’Hara, a gritty, two-fisted reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, featured an authentic newspaper background based on Stinson’s own career. He also wrote a series about another tough detective, Pete Rousseau, for Dime Detective in the post — World War II years. In all, Stinson wrote more than sixty mysteries for the pulps, as well as other genre stories for both the pulps and such slicks as Liberty. Only one Stinson novel made it into book form: Fingerprints (1925), which was published under the pseudonym Hunter (his mother’s maiden name) Stinson.
“Three Apes from the East” was published in the March 1938 issue.
“Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil” — but a killer forgets to do no evil.
Tim Harper, Los Angeles manager for International, likes to keep his office as unadorned as a gun turret, his desk as bare as the Mojave desert. He doesn’t believe in doodads, mementoes, bric-a-brac. So I was surprised to see what he had in front of him when he called me in late in the afternoon.
A third of the desk top was occupied by three apes in brass. Everyone knows the three monkeys I mean — one has his paws over his mouth, the second has them over his eyes and the third is holding his ears. I guess every family in the country has acquired one of the things some time or other and the gag that goes with the knick-knack is: “Speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil.”
“That,” I said, “is a swell mascot for a detective agency.”
The boss said without a smile, “The way our office has been producing lately, you and two other ops must have sat for it.”
Somebody in a chair off to the side of the boss’ office giggled. I looked over and it was Sue Jordan, small and blond and as dumb-looking in her very lovely way as ever. Behind that ga-ga beauty-winner’s map, though, is a combination of plenty gray matter, no nerves and a heart that could double, most of the time, for the business section of an electric icebox. Sue is the ace-in-skirts op of International and they shoot her around the map wherever necessary. She admits she’s good and usually proves it.
I said, “Hi, mug. I thought you were annoying the boys in the Chicago office.”
“I was, Kerry,” she cooed, “but they decided you boys out here needed the help of an expert, and here I am.”
“Cut the so-called comedy, you two,” Harper growled. His eyes jetted away from me toward the good-looking lad beside Sue.
The lad was in his thirties, as sleek as an oiled seal. There was a dark sharpness to his eyes, a leanness about his olive-skinned face. He had on snappy clothes, just saved from being too snappy by their sober color.
Tim Harper said, “Mr. Kirkwood, this is Mr. Thorne, one of our better operatives in his serious moments. Between Thorne and Miss Jordan, I believe we can wind up your case.”